Shofar FTP Archive File: camps/theresienstadt/theresien.05

Newsgroups: alt.revisionism
Subject: Holocaust Almanac: Theresienstadt & the transports
Summary:
Reply-To: kmcvay@nospamnizkor.org
Followup-To: alt.revisionism
Organization: The Nizkor Project http://www.nizkor.org
Keywords: theresienstadt
Archive/File: camps/theresienstadt/theresien.05
Last-Modified: 1994/09/20
"But the new year [1942] brought an unexpected blow - transports
were to continue, including out of Theresienstadt. All Edelstein's
efforts, all his ruses, had been aimed at a single objective: to
preserve the Jews of the Protectorate being deported to Poland. The
Germans had again broken their promise. Theresienstadt was but a
way station, not a city of refuge after all.
German headquarters in Terezin did not draw up the list of
transportees, as had been the case in Prague, but merely furnished
general guidelines for age groups. Doctors decided who was too ill
to be sent; members of the two advance units, A-K 1 and A-K 2,
administrative staff, doctors and nurses, were exempt. Otherwise,
the leadership accepted the task of selection, perhaps for lack of
choice, perhaps in the hope of saving the workers, the young
people, the teenagers in the name of a better tomorrow. All night
long the transport committee labored over the list, subject to
dreadful pressure from people who asked that their friends or their
relatives not be included. The responsibility was awesome.
As soon as news of the first transport spread, Gonda and Fredy did
everyting in their power to ensure that the children would not be
sent East; they must be kept at Theresienstadt to pursue their
studies, continuing the education they had received in study groups
and Youth-Aliyah: 'Except that there we led the children to
freedom,' Gonda wrote, 'and here we are trying to save them from
death.' Since it was decided not to send little children, their
families also remained in the ghetto. One mother, however, whose
ailing sister was included in the transport, insisted on leaving
with her small son. Gonda tried to dissuade her: the winter was
hard, the journey long. What did people imagine when they spoke of
'the East?' A different type of Theresienstadt, foreign soil, more
arduous living conditions in some Russian or Polish wasteland,
snow, frost, starvation rations, backbreaking work, no contact with
home. No one imagined any system of organized destruction. People
sometimes volunteered for transports in the hope of meeting family
members who had preceded them, as if 'the East' was a single
location. ...
Conceived as a Jewish city, Theresienstadt was no better than the
waiting room in a train station. Every transport, both incoming and
outgoing, was labeled with a letter of the alphabet until the
letters ran out, after which a combination of letters was used. The
first two transports, marked O and P, which left the ghetto on
January 9 and 15 respectively, were told that their destination was
Riga. Afterward, however, they set out with destination unknown.
The first transportees left Terezin before sunrise, in frost 23
degrees below zero, so that the townspeople would not see them, and
walked toward Bohusovice along the same road they had traveled so
recently; only then they had believed they were coming to a haven.
The departure of the first transport cast a dark cloud over the
ghetto, and Edelstein was doubly disillusioned: it was not just the
Germans who had lied to him; the Czechs, too, had broken their
promise. He told Dittl Ornstein and other staff members that
President Hacha and the Czech government had explicitly assured him
that they would not agree to the deportation of the Protectorate's
Jews (correspondence after fall 1941 between the offices of the
president and Reichsprotektor attests only to the desire to isolate
Jews from the general public).
Lest the incubus of transports prove insufficient, another event
took place in early January that shattered all remaining illusions
as to the true nature of the Jewish city: a gallows was erected."
(Bondy, 259-60)
Work Cited
Bondy, Ruth. Elder of the Jews. New York: Grove Press, 1989.
(Translated from "Edelshtain neged had-zeman". Zmora, Bitan,
Modan, publishers, 1981

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